The Value of TV check-in Data to Media Planning

July 21, 2011

Social networks focused on entertainment – TV in particular – are lively places. People are now “checking-in” to TV shows with services such as GetGlue and Miso to earn badges, stickers and points while engaging with friends. Others check out sites like SocialGuide, Twitter and TVGuide to see what’s trending and feel like they’re participating in a greater communal event. In fact, research shows they have multiple screens up and running while they watch TV. Either way, people are no longer content to just sit in front of their TVs, and media planners need more of the right kind of data in order to make informed decisions.

These check-in sites and other similar services promote themselves as a “social TV guide,” one that replaces the cable box/DVR menu, which only a short time ago displaced TV Guide magazines and newspaper TV sections. In essence, these new tools are just ways of channeling existing motivation. From a media planning standpoint, they tease at unlocking new ways of reaching a target audience.

Tease is the important word here. Because as much as these services provide clues to the tastes and urges of the Xers and Yers who are tweeting and tumbling as they watch, they are actually doing a great disservice to understanding the larger conversation of the TV-watching community. The reason for this is that these “check-ins” and “tweet-outs” are taking place in real-time, which means you are only capturing a snapshot in the arc of a TV show’s lifespan, and missing out on the larger picture of who are fans of a TV program.

The impact of a TV show’s content starts with pre-airing buzz, grows with  the show premiere, and lives on forever through on-demand and DVR viewings, streaming and downloading online, Netflix views, box-set DVDs and Blu-rays, and now portable devices such as tablets and smartphones. Most importantly though, TV shows live on forever in the hearts of their fans who express their adoration across multiple platforms, who start with check-ins and tweets and move on to creating more permanent image macros and fan fiction. In some cases, a fan of a TV show doesn’t appear until after the show has aired.

An example of this was The Wire, one of the most critically acclaimed shows of the last decade. Most of its fans never even watched the episodes when they aired live. Battlestar Galactica likewise had a healthy following, but many of those viewers didn’t get into it until the second season, when it appeared as re-runs or even later when it was released on DVD.

Think of this type of fan participation and collaboration as a ladder. Each rung requires more time and energy to obtain, but with each step you progressively discover richer insights around what viewers love and hate. For media planning purposes, you’re interested in the social conversations happening across all of these viewer engagements, and check-in services and social TV guides are just the first step in getting to know a show’s audience.

As media buyers come to terms with the reality that there are more and more ways to actually measure active forms of audience engagement than GRPs now currently provide, we’re finding that the difference between watching ephemeral check-in services and studying dedicated fan fiction forums is like the difference between monitoring and listening. It’s great to watch things trend live and experience what fans are saying, but real-time data is much different from what Judah Phillips of Monster Worldwide calls “timely data.”

Timely data provides the space, which real-time data limits, for themes and topics around what people like and don’t like about a show to propagate. These insights offer great value to media buyers because with those themes and topics they can do deeper integrations (product placement, contests, etc.) into the program that reaches the fans true interests.  On top of that timely data is in sync with strategic decisions and timelines because no one can make informed reactions to real-time data. Upfronts negotiations, for example, start in the spring and end nearly in the fall because every decision is an important one. Media buying and content partnerships are no different.  This is why social check-ins are a great place to start, but you will still want to gain richer insights into what people really care about from their natural conversations across the social media world. As they, their friends and others warm to a show, and its fan base builds (or perhaps wanes), you can use topic discovery and social data analytics to capture the evolving buzz and hone your media placement accordingly

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